Tales from Shawangunk, Part 72

TALES FROM SHAWANGUNK Chapter 72 by Peggy Spencer Behrendt

Rising floodwaters threatened Peg and Tim’s home last year.

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In 1974, Tim and Peggy Spencer Behrendt set off on an adventure. They began a new life in the woods of Cold Brook, NY, without modern conveniences like electricity or indoor plumbing. These are excerpts and reflections from Peggy’s journal chronicling their adventures and also her childhood memories growing up in Westmoreland.

The wind has picked up. Golden yellow, red, and orange leaves swirl about, going every which way, colliding with everything, swirling like ghost spirits in an anxious frenzy. The wind now has that mournful, hollow sound of winter when the cheery chatter of rustling leaves is only a blissful summer memory. This is an appropriate time for Halloween.

Last year, in 2019, there was a huge storm and flooding on Halloween night. We watched Misty Brook in front of our house rise the next morning, creeping higher and closer to our cottage than ever before in 45 years here. We started getting a bit nervous when I heard that a whole house was floating down the West Canada Creek only a few miles away. Would we have to evacuate?

When I was fourteen, my family had to quickly vacate from a campground. We were traveling across the United States and were hurriedly awakened early one morning in the Dakotas. “Get up!” mom called out, “We’ve got to get out of here!” The wind was racing toward us from the west and madly whipping our old military canvas tent. Across the plains, on the horizon, we could see malevolent clouds of billowing black, turning a sickly green and gold with every lightning flash. I was instantly concerned about a stray dog I’d befriended the night before and wanted to look for it but had to help take down the tent and load the station wagon. Dad was still tying gear on the roof when heavy rain began plummeting down, and we kids squeezed into the car just in time. Mom flew into the front seat and slammed the door shut. We were pretty scared, but when mom looked back at us, she burst out laughing! All she could see was a wild confabulation of still inflated sleeping mats, blankets, pillows, and boxes of food in complete disarray with

Tim watches floodwaters rise, October 31, 2019

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Tim considers using a water trough as a boat before Peg finds the canoe

Peg and daughter Becky float above the submerged walkway using the handrails to navigate

our three little faces with big eyes and tousled hair peeking out from among them. Dad tapped on the driver’s side door and yelled above the percussion of rain; “Are you all right?” (He thought she might be hysterical.) “I’m fine, but I don’t know about them!” as she pointed out our exceedingly cramped situation.

As we drove out, we saw other tents blowing over with their former inhabitants running about in a frenzy, getting soaked as they tried to retrieve gear blown off by the fierce wind. We didn’t get very far, though. We had to stop and wait for the rain to abate, as the windshield wipers couldn’t even keep up with the deluge. Tim and I have seen other exceptionally dramatic storms in our own North Country, and one of the wildest occurred rather recently as we were driving home between Deerfield Hill and Poland on Rt. 8. A fierce wind blasted across the plateau from the north-west, full of hard-driving rain. The air was livid with unceasingly pulsating flashes; like a fluorescent light when it’s beginning to ebb, filling heaven and earth with eerie glows of greenish-gold. Roaring, crashing thunder rolls heaved like tsunami swells temporarily obscuring the mad staccato of rain pelting our car so we could hardly see the road. Wildly branching blasts of electricity shot from the low clouds to the ground all around us as our car lurched through wind gusts.

This was a fierce, other-worldly chaos of electricity, wind, and rain, and I seriously wondered if we would survive it. Tim offered to take over the wheel, but I was afraid to stop and drove grimly on.

It tempered when we finally began the descent down Schermerhorn Hill into the Kuyahoora Valley and escaped the in-

tense fury across the highlands, but I dreaded continuing on up Cold Brook Hill to another plateau and risk entering the same dangerous conditions. However, surprisingly, the storm wasn’t so fierce here. In fact, when we got home in the Shawangunk Valley, it just seemed like an average thunder and lightning storm. Now, in 2019, Misty Brook is still rising and getting extremely close to our house. I am starting to think about escape options. Tim looks for a low, galvanized water trough the grandkids floated in the creek one summer. I remember the canoe we left at the beaver pond upstream, but it’s on the opposite side of the creek! Will we have to swim across to get it? I hike up through the woods to see if I could possibly walk across the beaver dam and get to it. What a surprise to see that Misty Brook’s upstream borders are almost normal! I’m able to cross it without much difficulty by carefully balancing on semi-submerged logs for a short distance! YAY! No flooding to speak of up here! I drag the canoe home along the road, then launch it across from our cottage, floating merrily above our walkway. I don’t even need a paddle. I can pull myself along with my hands on the handrail. Obviously, the flooding is not due to Misty Brook but from Black Creek, at least a half-mile away!

It’s fun for a while, navigating back and forth through the maze of alder trees to get in and out. And our son-in-law tries paddling toward the main channel of Black Creek but the current gets too strong. The high tide of the flood came within a few inches of our foundation before receding. Whew!

November is the portal to winter in the Adirondacks and a whole new constellation of daily chores involving running the wood stove, gathering dry leaves for our composting toilet, transplanting green vegetables into the greenhouse, getting water through the ice in the creek, clearing snow and ice off paths and parking areas… but this seems minuscule when, one Thanksgiving day, our brotherin-law, Ed Roberts, tells us about some of the chores he had as a lad on a dairy farm near my family home in Westmoreland.

“I started working with my foster father on his farm at about age seven, helping to feed and bed his herd of 30 cows plus cleaning the stalls. At nine, I started helping with milking. We’d get up at 4am in the morning to work in the barn; just the two of us, feeding and milking the cows. That took about an hour and a half which means that about 6:30 he’d head back into the house to get ready for his job driving a school bus, leaving me with the clean-up. I fed the cows, washed the milk machines, cleaned the platforms where the cows stood, pushed the straw and manure into the gutter; then

Milk gets processed at the Dairylea plant in Utica, 1960s

cleaned the gutters with a shovel, put it in a manure spreader, took the spreader out, and spread it in a field (or dumped in a pile) and came back. It was all really hard work, but I loved it!”

My friend, Janice Reilly also helped in the barn as a child; cleaning gutters, feeding cows... She remembers the rhythmic “chit, chit, chit…” of the milking machines, the whitewashed walls, the warm air sweetly full with the aroma of milk and hay and manure (which they didn’t mind). When sunbeams peeked through, she’d see bits of hay dust floating lazily about, and there were always lots of multicolored cats around. Another farm boy recalled the hazard of occasionally getting kicked or showered by a

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cow urinating in the stall next to where he was doing the milking. “At least,” he commented wryly, “it was warm.”

Ed continued; “When I was sixteen and could drive, I had a morning milk route in addition to the milking. I’d pick up milk at two neighboring farms in our stake truck, filling it with 30 - 35 cans. Each one held 10 gallons so that’d be about 100# apiece that I’d lift onto the truck. I’d grab two of them at a time because I wanted to hurry up. I’d take this all the way down to Eagle St in Utica to the Dairylea Plant (about 10 miles), and unload the cans on the conveyor. They’d go through a process where they were dumped, cleaned, and came back out the conveyor at the other end. I’d load the empty cans back onto the

Peg’s sister Marion marries Ed Roberts, 1973

truck, deliver them back to the farms, and then get to school!

“As soon as I got home after school at 3:15, I’d grab a peanut butter & jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, change my clothes and go back in the barn to work. Stan would get home from driving bus around 4 to 4:30; we’d milk from 5 to 6:30, then re-bed the cows for the night, and come in for supper around 7pm. By the time we finished around 7:30, I was too tired to study! I had to go to sleep so I could get up at 4am and do it all over again; seven days a week! Consequently, my high school marks were terrible, but when I got to college, (studying Agricultural Engineering) I ended up with a 3.8 average because I had all the time in the world to study.

“The best days of my early life were on the Merriman Farm. All the previous foster parents just wanted me to help with the work and get the money from the county. But the Merrimans were very kind, and helped me with my problems, instead of punishing me (sometimes violently) like others had. For instance, when I first went there, I got caught sneaking food up to my room, and it wasn’t just a little snack;

I had drumsticks from the chicken, and lots more! So I was scared to death, when they found out, thinking; ‘Boy I’m really going to get it!’ But instead, Mrs. Merriman said,

‘If you’re hungry, Eddie, just come to the kitchen and help yourself. You can have all you want.’ Well, that was something new to me, and I was so relieved! Stan was good to me, too, although he did argue with me a lot. I didn’t realize ‘til after I was married, that he just liked to argue, right or wrong, just to get me going.

“I don’t think there’s a day in my life that I don’t think about them. They were so good to me! And working hard didn’t hurt me. To work means to get dirty. There’s dirt that washes off, and dirt that stains. I’ve been embarrassed by the dirt stains on my hands, but it’s really a badge of honor, to have the color of the earth on you.”

This month of harvest before the long months of winter succinctly points to the preciousness of the Earth and the elements. To the farmers, truck drivers, shop owners, and all who bring forth the delicious nourishment that sustains the gift of life for humanity, Tim writes: “Hands hardened from tiresome toil are as honorable as degrees signed by esteemed educators. The calloused hand is precious, like the full heart. Let us be moderate in everything except gratitude.” •

The Shawangunk Nature Preserve is a deep ecology, forever wild, 501©(3), learning and cultural center. Tim and Peggy still live there and can be contacted through their website. www.shawangunknaturepreserve.com

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